Stuart Reid is a Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of the West of Scotland and the University of Glasgow and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. He has spent the last 14 years developing technology for gravitational wave detectors, and is co-inventor of ͞nanokicking͟, where precise nanoscale vibrations can be used to control the behaviour (and fate) of adult stem cells.

Hearing black holes collide

On 14th September 2015 two giant laser interferometers known as LIGO, the most sensitive instruments ever built, detected gravitational waves from the merger of a pair of massive black holes more than a billion light years from the Earth – throwing out a gravitational signal with energy ten times greater than the combined light power from all the stars and galaxies in the observable Universe. Join Professor Stuart Reid as he recounts the inside story of this remarkable discovery –hailed by many as the scientific breakthrough of the century.